Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational systems.  Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeply effective, if only the will and the throng of various motives which guide it, instantly followed impression of a truth upon the intelligence.  And they are, moreover, so easily communicated, saving the parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking in shaping his own character, after such a pattern as shall silently draw all within its influence to pursuit of good and honourable things.  The most valuable of Rousseau’s notions about education, though he by no means consistently adhered to them, was his urgent contempt for this fatuous substitution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the deeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visible circumstance.  The vast improvements that have since taken place in the theory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he has the honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter, may all be traced to the spread of this wise principle, and its adoption in various forms.  The change in the up-bringing of the young exactly corresponds to the change in the treatment of the insane.  We may look back to the old system of endless catechisms, apophthegms, moral fables, and the rest of the paraphernalia of moral didactics, with the same horror with which we regard the gags, strait-waistcoats, chains, and dark cells, of poor mad people before the intervention of Pinel.

It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this most important of all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first quality in connection with right doing, which you can develop in the young, and this spontaneousness of habit is best secured by associating it with the approval of those to whom the child looks.  Sympathy, in a word, is the true foundation from which to build up the structure of good habit.  The young should be led to practise the elementary parts of right conduct from the desire to please, because that is a securer basis than the conclusions of an embryo reason, applied to the most complex conditions of action, while the grounds on which action is justified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time, when the understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and terms essential to the matter.  You have two aims to secure, each without sacrifice of the other.  These are, first, that the child shall grow up with firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retain respect for reason and an open mind.  The latter may be acquired in the less immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earlier times, a man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, that makes his life either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helpless for want of ready conclusions.